Here's a quick reminder for 2018. You can always find a list of Slashdot's ten most-visited stories for the preceding year in the Slashdot "Hall of Fame." It will also tell you which stories got the most comments during the preceding year, and also reveals the most active submitters and most active poll topics.

- Most unique commenters: I suppose it's somewhat doable but only if you log the IP addresses or eliminate all AC comments from the pool.- Most heavily moderated: directly related to amount of comments and views.- Most linked to: maybe - how do you reliably measure that?

I'm surprised my submission on Donald Trump winning isn't higher on the list, honestly, given that it has the unfair advantage of somehow being a related story for damned near every story on here for the past year. Some of the stories it sorta makes sense, but I know there were more than a few stories where I wondered how it could possibly be related.

>. I'll also need it to run pretty fast due to my desired complexity for the game. Therefore, a scripting language like Python probably isn't the best choice

The language has little impact on the speed. When using "a scripting language like Python", the few operations that take up most of the time should generally be done in the interpreter / library anyway. For example, sorting is a slow operation - a shell script can sort just about as fast as any language, because the actual sort is done by the "sort"